After-Action Report: Festival of Holidays

A short one this time—I'm still working on getting back on track, and you don't want to waste hours of your Christmas reading my barely-coherent ramblings.

Last year, our Christmastime Disneyland visit turned out to be more of Christmastime California Adventure visit, because the new Festival of Holidays event proved so engaging. We didn't even visit the food kiosks due to lack of funds, but I got a good review of World of Color: Season of Light out of it, so it wasn't a total loss.

This year...it happened again. And this time we did try some of the food offerings. More on that in a bit, but for now, I want to focus on what a good idea the Festival of Holidays is in general. Guys? Management guys? This is how you leverage your California theme to provide quality entertainment while still pulling in the money you love so much. If there's one thing we Californians pride ourselves on, it's our multicultural savvy.* This state boasts an extremely high level of ethnic and cultural diversity, and by and large we embrace it.

Flipping the Script: Enchanted Tiki Room

Okay, so it wound up being two weeks instead. I'm still getting back up to speed in more ways than one.

For those of you in similar circumstances (getting up to speed, that is), Flipping the Script is my new post category addressing the wide (but perhaps not wide enough) world of Disney-attractions-turned-movies. Last time, I briefly examined the existing list of such movies to see what does and doesn't work about them. Now it's time to start proposing my own ideas for what Disney could do with this underserved concept in the future. And the first one is perhaps a little obvious, but I think it potentially has legs: the Enchanted Tiki Room!

Flipping the Script: Up Until This Point

They haven't been talking about it much, but from what I can tell, the Jungle Cruise movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” “Maui” Johnson is still going to be a thing. And that's pretty cool. There have been what, half a dozen Disney theme park attraction IPs adapted into movies at this point, of which only one has been financially successful (and boy howdy has it ever), yet they're still willing to tap this well for inspiration. That's actually...a bit heartening. It means the decision-makers actually recognize that a ride or attraction doesn't have to be based on a movie to be worthwhile in its own right. Here's hoping the Jungle Cruise flick is good enough to be enjoyable, but not so successful that they install a bunch of Dwayne Johnson animatronics in the actual Jungle.

But that gets me thinking...where to next for the ultimate trend in flipping the theme park script? What other attractions have decent film potential? Hence this new post category: Flipping the Script,* wherein I explore the possibilities! For this first installment, however, I'm going to briefly review the existing “theme park movies” and see if I can tease out a) Disney's methodology for producing them and b) patterns of success and failure in said methodology. How do ride concepts map onto things like film genre and themes? How much does the existing structure of a ride constrain its film adaptation? How much should it constrain it? And so on.